A vanished Arcadia : being some account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607 to 1767 / by R.B. Cunninghame Graham.

  • Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A vanished Arcadia : being some account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607 to 1767 / by R.B. Cunninghame Graham. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE RUINED MISSIONS eaten. In the former, usually he bade you go with God, and, if you spoke of payment, said : ‘ Well, send me a book of Hours when you get to Asuncion.' Of Indians, hardly any were left to judge of, for in the villages in which, according to the reports furnished to Bucareli, the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres at the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits, the population numbered in the thirty towns of the missions one hundred and twenty thousand,* a population of at most twenty thousand was to be found. On every side the powerful vegetation had covered up the fields. On ruined church and chapel, and on broken tower, the lianas climbed as if on trees, creep¬ ing up the belfries, and throwing great masses of scarlet and purple flowers out of the apertures where once were hung the bells. In the thick jungles a few half-wild cattle still were to be found. The vast estancias, where once the Jesuits branded two and three thousand calves a year, and from whence thousands of mules went forth to Chile and Bolivia, were all neglected. Horses were scarce and poor, crops few and indifferent, and the plantations made by the Jesuits of the tree {Ilex Paraguayensis) from which is made the yerha mate, were all destroyed. In the vast forests, stretching to the Salto de Guayra, a few scattered tribes known as Caaguas, roamed through the thickets, or encamped upon the streams. In the thirty towns, once full of life and stir, in every one of which there was a church, finer, as an old Spanish writer says, than any in Buenos Ayres, there was naught but desolation and despair. The Indians either had returned into the woods, been killed in the ceaseless revolutionary wars, or had been absorbed into the Gaucho popula- * See the reports of the Marques de Valdelirios and others in the publications of Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872, and in the ‘ Ensayo de la Historia Civil de Paraguay, Buenos-Ayres y Tucuman ’ por Dr. Don Gregorio Funes, Buenos Ayres, 1816.
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